American Titan: Searching for John Wayne

by Marc Eliot

  ONLY A MONTH AFTER COMPLETING True Grit, Wayne made The Undefeated, directed by Andrew McLaglen, costarring Rock Hudson, one of the many heir apparents to Wayne’s throne. The only problem, as Wayne saw it, was Rock’s homosexuality, then unknown to the public. At first, he was reluctant to work with Hudson because of it, but as he got to know him, he was able to put his apprehensions aside and do some good work. He and Hudson played a lot of cards together between scenes and by the end of filming had forged the unlikeliest of friendships. It did a lot for Wayne to be able to cross this late-in-the-day divide. The film put a million dollars in his pocket, plus 10 percent of the profits after the film earned back its negative cost.

  AFTER HIS ANNUAL CHECKUP, WHICH showed no signs of his lung cancer having returned, Wayne and his assistant, Mary, flew to Durango to film Chisum, a Batjac production that brought him a million dollars from Warner Bros, $5,000 a week for expenses and 10 percent of the film’s profits. Chisum was originally commissioned by Twentieth Century–Fox, but after a series of big-picture failures (Robert Wise’s Star with Julie Andrews; Gene Kelly’s Hello Dolly! with Barbra Streisand), they put it into turnaround. Warner Bros immediately picked it up for distribution.

  Filming ended in December 1969, just as Wayne got word he was going to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in True Grit.

  Chapter 26

  Despite Wayne’s being at the top of his game, named the fourth-most-popular actor in Hollywood for the year 1969, the twenty-first time he’d made the list, the film he was working on, Rio Lobo, had an undeniably elegiac feel to it.134 When Wayne returned to the set after having won his Oscar for True Grit, everyone in the cast and crew wore an eye patch in honor of his first-ever Academy win. Rio Lobo, Wayne’s 161st feature film, and Hawks’s forty-sixth (that would be the last of his career), was essentially a remake of two of his earlier collaborations with Wayne, Rio Bravo and El Dorado, and the weakest of the trilogy. Produced and directed by Hawks and Batjac, and distributed by National General, Rio Lobo closed the door on big studio westerns. The film was released in December 1970 and barely made back its production costs; it competed with Arthur Hiller’s fabulously fatalistic college romance, Love Story, which earned the most money of any film at the box office that year; Robert Altman’s MASH, set in the Korean War but pointedly critical of the seemingly never-ending war in Vietnam; Michael Wadleigh’s documentary of the hippie-laden Woodstock; Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, his postmodern look at the clash between existentialism and true love, starring Jack Nicholson; and Ted Post’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes. There were “war” pictures, too, but they looked like nothing that Wayne had ever made. The biggest, Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton, reportedly Richard Nixon’s favorite film, was darker and more complex than most World War II films. And there was Brian G. Hutton’s Kelly’s Heroes, a heist movie disguised as a war film, with soldiers stealing gold from the Germans for their own use. While Wayne continued to promote the heroics of the Great American Western Hero, American films began to move in other directions, leaving him and his style behind. It was as if the Academy had said to him, Okay, here is your Oscar, now fade away.

  DURING THE MAKING OF RIO Lobo, Wayne had a tendency, as he had during True Grit, to show the younger actors in the picture how to act. Rio Lobo had originally been written for Wayne and Robert Mitchum, but the budget couldn’t afford both of them. The producers felt Wayne could carry the picture by himself, and hired Mitchum’s son, Christopher, for a much lower fee. Watching him try to pick up a pistol drove Wayne crazy. Finally he grabbed it from his hand and said, “If you’re gonna pick up that handgun, Chris, for Christ’s sake, don’t do it that way.” He then looked at Hawks and said, “Isn’t that right, Mr. Hawks?” “That’s right, Duke.” Wayne was always mindful of his directors, and never wanted to show them up on set.

  While filming, Wayne received news that his brother had died of cancer. He had always taken care of Robert, who had lived off the Wayne name all his life. Wayne disappeared for a day before resuming work on the film.

  Wayne’s next film was Big Jake, made by Batjac for Warner Bros, and directed by George Sherman. It starred Ethan in his first major role, as Wayne’s grandson. Michael Wayne produced, and Patrick Wayne had a featured role. The film also featured Christopher Mitchum again and reunited Wayne with Maureen O’Hara, although much of her role was left on the cutting-room floor. The film went nowhere at the box office, confirming Wayne’s fears that his days as an important filmmaker had ended with True Grit.

  ALSO THAT YEAR, WAYNE’S MOTHER, Mary, passed away after a long bout with lung cancer. She had moved to Long Beach after she and Clyde divorced, remarried, and lived there for the rest of her life with her second husband and Robert.

  IN 1971, WAYNE GAVE AN interview to Playboy magazine, of all places, a hard-hitting, no-holds-barred Q and A. Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s flamboyant and extremely liberal publisher, couldn’t have asked for a better subject. It was as if now that Wayne had his Oscar behind him, he could say what he really wanted to but couldn’t. Besides his harsh condemnation of High Noon and his unabashed pride in running Carl Foreman out of the country, the most shocking part of the entire interview was Wayne’s putting the blame on the U.S. military for the failure to end the war in Vietnam: “If Douglas MacArthur were alive, he would have handled the Vietnam situation [sic]. He was a proven administrator, certain a proven leader. And MacArthur understood what Americans were and what American stood for.” He also praised President Truman for his “great guts” in taking on the North Koreans. He blamed the State Department for holding Truman back from widening the war. He explained the reason he never wanted to run for office was that America was too much of a system of checks and balances. He claimed he was offered an opportunity to run as George Wallace’s vice presidential candidate on the 1968 American Independent ticket and turned it down for two reasons, the first being he was busy producing True Grit and, second, he was a solid, loyal Nixon man. He also blamed his politics as the reason for the critical failure of The Green Berets and referred to the New York Times critic Renata Adler as an “irrational liberal.” This water-cooler interview got the entire country talking about John Wayne again.

  AFTER BIG JAKE, HE MADE The Cowboys, his only 1972 release (January), directed by Mark Rydell, at Universal, for which Wayne was paid $1 million and 15 percent of the net profits. The film was a hit, grossing over $7 million, and gave Wayne audiences everything they wanted from his movies—lots of action and a tough but understanding hero. In this film, he hires eleven young boys to help him drive his cattle four hundred miles from his ranch to the railroad. There are obvious echoes of Red River in the story, with Wayne helping these young boys grow to manhood, experiencing prostitutes, fights, thieves, and rustlers. The villain in the film is played by Bruce Dern, who shoots and kills Wayne’s character. When they were making that scene, Wayne turned to Dern, whom he didn’t particularly like, seeing him as part of the new wave of long-haired actors who had no respect for “old” Hollywood, and said, “Ooh, they’re going to hate you for this,” to which Dern said, “Maybe, but in Berkeley I’ll be a fucking hero.”

  It was one of those shoots where Wayne didn’t bring his children along, perhaps because he was “killed” in the film and he didn’t want them to see that. When his young son Ethan asked when him he’d be back, Wayne answered using one of his favorite expressions, “In about three months, God willing and the river don’t rise.”

  In some ways, The Cowboys is the best of Wayne’s post–True Grit films, suffering only from his advancing age that kept him from being more physical. As Rex Reed crudely put it in his review of the film for the New York Daily News: “Old Dusty Britches can still act!”

  In the winter of 1972, Wayne made The Train Robbers, a Batjac production in association with Warner Bros, produced by Michael and written and directed by Burt Kennedy. Bill Clothier was the cinematographer. Shot in Durango, the film costarred Ann-Margret as a bea
utiful widow who enlists Wayne to recover a half million in gold stolen by her late husband, from the train that is now carrying it. To help him, he hires Ben Johnson and Rod Taylor. Bobby Vinton was added to the cast to attract younger audiences. The film climaxes in a grand shoot-out. After Wayne and company return the gold to Ann-Margret, she is promptly arrested by a Pinkerton man from Wells Fargo. She has made up the whole story to get Wayne and his boys to rob the train for her. The film came in at a negative cost of $3.5 million and was one of Wayne’s few post–True Grit failures.

  He stayed in Durango to shoot his next film, Cahill, U.S. Marshal, without bothering to return home.

  WAYNE AND PILAR FORMALLY SEPARATED that same year, after having lived in separate bedrooms for the past three; Pilar had told the children it was because of Wayne’s snoring, but of course that wasn’t the reason. Wayne had been slowly drifting away from his family, even more so after his Oscar win. He was cranking out films and spending more and more time on the road, always leaving Pilar behind, he said, to run the household.

  Fully recovered from her addictions, she soon developed interests of her own to try to create an identity separate and apart from her husband’s. Pilar did give him one final chance to save their marriage with an ultimatum, either go to marriage counseling with her or give her a divorce. He agreed to the counseling but quit after two sessions. To a friend, he said, “Hell, it’s over with Pilar.”

  And there was something else. Wayne had a new woman in his life.

  The story of his May-December seven-year involvement with Pat Stacy, an attractive, petite, thirty-year-old brown-haired divorcée from Indiana he had chosen to replace the retiring Mary St. John as his personal assistant, is a complicated one and difficult to parse. She was a graduate of Northeastern University, had moved to Los Angeles in 1968, and landed a job at Arthur Andersen & Co., Wayne’s new tax accountants. There she was handpicked by Mary St. John to be her eventual replacement. When Mary ran her choice by Wayne, he enthusiastically agreed. He liked what he’d heard and even more what he saw.

  There is no question Pat Stacy was enamored of Wayne as well, and soon after became his constant traveling companion while Pilar remained at home. In 1973, he took The Wild Goose up the coast to Seattle, to film McQ, a contemporary detective thriller directed by John Sturges along the lines of Steve McQueen’s 1968 Bullitt. It was now easier for the sixty-six-year-old Wayne to get in and out of cars than on and off horses. Pat accompanied him on the trip. It was during the making of this film that she and Wayne became lovers. Stacy: “We finished shooting one day, and we all went to our staterooms. I was headed for mine when Duke put his arm around me and led me to his. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do. I went with him. We had a great admiration and affection for each other, but I don’t think we said we loved each other.”

  Wayne made no effort to hide the affair from anyone and Pilar heard about it almost immediately. Once again she offered to divorce him. He refused. According to Pilar, Mary St. John told her that Wayne spent the next three days without Pat, fighting back tears.

  Wayne recovered quickly, knowing that Stacy had awakened something in him that had been dormant for a long while. He was still capable of having sex, but there something inside that was not so easily touched, and Pat had been able to reach it. They even talked about marriage, but Wayne told her he had already failed at it three times, that if he were still in his fifties he might try again, but now it was too late for any of that. He liked things the way they were. Stacy accepted the truth of their relationship, that he would never marry her; it was what it was and the way it would always be.

  JOHN FORD DIED AT 6:35 P.M. on August 31, 1973, in the arms of Woody Strode, a longtime member of Ford’s stock company of actors. Wayne knew that he had been seriously ill for a time and had lived for the past several years in unofficial retirement in Palm Desert, California, an upscale, unofficial village for Hollywood’s most privileged seniors. Ford had made his last feature, 7 Women, in 1968, which was critically well received but did not do well at the box office (Andrew Sarris named it his favorite American film of that year).135 Ford rarely went into Hollywood after that, but did once more, early in 1973, to receive the American Film Institute’s first Life Achievement Award. Wayne gave a touching tribute to his longtime friend and mentor.

  Near the end the bedridden Ford had called Wayne and asked him to come out to the desert. As soon as he completed McQ, Wayne made the trip and sat by Ford’s bedside, grimly smiling as he reminisced with the director, whose body was shrunken and ravaged by cancer. Ford drank a little brandy and berated Wayne for making frequent appearances on the popular TV show Laugh-In, saying that it would hurt his career. Wayne listened and said nothing, holding Pappy’s hand to try to comfort the Old Man.

  The next day Ford died and Wayne fell into a deep depression. He turned for comfort not to Pilar, but to Pat.

  NOT LONG AFTER FORD’S DEATH Wayne made no secret of the fact to everyone, including Pat, that he missed being with Pilar. They even toyed with the idea of reconciling, but neither could make the first move back. Pilar was aware of Pat’s loving role in Wayne’s life and wasn’t sure she would put up with it. She decided to move ahead with her own life without him.

  Early in 1974, the Harvard Lampoon lightheartedly laid the gauntlet down, publicly daring Wayne to show up in Cambridge, accept their annual “Brass Balls” award, and face the crowd in person in the square. He called Pilar and asked her what she thought he should do. She warned him against it, telling him they would ridicule him, that college students could be vicious. He decided to go anyway. He had never shied away from a fight in his life, on- or off-screen, and he wasn’t about to start now. At whatever way they came to him, he could and would come back the same way. He saw it as an opportunity to try to connect to a part of his audience that had turned away from his films in favor of the new, independent movies that spoke more directly to them, like Mike Nichols’s 1967 The Graduate, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, none of which could possibly have been made at the height of the studio system’s golden era. Wayne detested them. None looked anything like the kind of movies he had made for nearly fifty years. He wanted to show the students that he had a sense of humor and didn’t mind being made fun of.

  The day of the big visit, he was driven around the square in an armored personnel carrier, looking like nothing so much as a cross between a head of state and a prisoner of war. Students shouted insults at him, which he responded to with a broad smile and a wave. He was then delivered to the Harvard Square Theater for a question-and-answer session that pushed the limits of good taste but made everybody laugh, including him. Where did he get that phony toupee? Wayne chuckled and said it was real hair, just not his. Women’s lib? Women can do anything they want as long as they have dinner on the table when men get home. Did he look at himself as the fulfillment of the American Dream? He tried not to look at himself any more than he had to. By the end of the day, the students were cheering for Wayne, who had taken everything they could throw at him and was still standing.

  IN JUNE 1974, WAYNE FLEW to Chicago and then London to film Brannigan, another policier, part of his ongoing attempt to look more contemporary, or more relevant. Taking its cue from Clint Eastwood, Brannigan is a modern-day western on the order of Dirty Harry. The film, a Batjac/Jules Levy/Arthur Gardner production, was executive-produced by Wayne’s son Michael and distributed by United Artists. Tough talk, fistfights, car chases—all more of the same. Wayne moved with difficulty, felt old, and looked it. It was another paycheck movie—Wayne received $750,000 and a good percentage of the profits. While filming Brannigan, Wayne came down with a bad cold, followed by a fever and a cough, then began to cough up blood, immediately triggering fears that something was seriously wrong. Despite Pat’s presence and willingness to care for him, Wayne now insisted he needed Pilar. He called and invited her to take the kids and join him in the big house he was staying i
n for the duration of filming. Pilar accepted his offer. Pat Stacy picked them all up at the airport. Wayne was too busy filming.

  He had presents waiting for everybody, and when after that day’s shoot, he met everybody at a small dinner party he had arranged for that evening. Pat did not attend. After, Wayne confessed to Pilar that he had lost his sexual vitality.

  By the third week Pilar was ready to go home. When she told Wayne she was leaving, he looked sad and depressed and reassured Pilar he hoped they could all live together again when he got back to California, the whole family under the same roof, the way it used to be.

  Pilar returned to Newport Beach, happy and optimistic, after thinking it over during the long flight home and deciding she wanted to reconcile with her husband. She placed a call to him in London to tell him her decision. The phone in his suite was answered by a butler, who informed her that he had gone to Paris. Pilar asked to speak to Pat. He said she wasn’t there, that she had accompanied him on the trip. Pilar thanked him and hung up the phone.

  In Paris, Wayne and Pat stayed in their suite, leaving it only when they had to, except when he wanted to buy her expensive designer clothes. If Pat tried three or four dresses, Wayne would insist she take all of them.

  When Wayne finally returned to California, Pilar confronted him about his trip to Paris with Stacy and again asked him if he wanted a divorce. He said no, they should stay together for the sake of the children. He didn’t deny the trip to Paris or elaborate on it, or on his relationship with Pat. Pilar knew that day they would never live together as husband and wife again.

  In her book, Pilar wrote of what followed that day: “From then on we were to meet as intimate strangers. I even began dating, although my thoughts and my heart were still with Duke . . . it is still difficult for me to write about Pat Stacy and the role she played in our lives.”